Former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell on Wednesday accused the team of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis of engaging in prosecutorial misconduct in the Georgia election case.
Along with former President Donald Trump and more than a dozen others, Ms. Powell is accused of multiple felony counts under Georgia’s anti-racketeering law for allegedly conspiring to illegally overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. She’s pleaded not guilty.
Ms. Powell and another 2020 election lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, are scheduled to go to trial on Oct. 23 after they requested expedited proceedings. Their cases were also severed from the other 17 co-defendants’ cases.
In Wednesday’s filing, her lawyers argue that Ms. Willis and her team of prosecutors likely violated Napue, referring to a 1959 Supreme Court decision that held the knowing use of false testimony by a prosecutor in a criminal case violates the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. That can also impact only the credibility of the witness and doesn’t directly relate to either guilt or innocence of the defendant.
Fulton County prosecutors “must have presented a misleading and false case to the grand jury, or the grand jury simply rubber-stamped the Indictment,” the filing states. “The State was in possession of substantial exculpatory evidence which it must not have presented, and this Court should carefully review the grand jury proceedings for Napue and ethical violations by the prosecution.”
Earlier in September, Ms. Powell—who generated headlines in 2020 for her “Kraken” election lawsuit forecasts—wrote in a motion to dismiss the case that Georgia’s anti-racketeering statute is vague in its present application by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office.
“If the Georgia RICO statute reaches the conduct alleged here, then it is unconstitutionally vague. Already, its application has necessarily been decided on a case-by-case basis,” her lawyers wrote. “It has enabled the District Attorney’s office to make life-altering choices of those to indict—when thousands of people fall within the prosecutors’ definition of RICO here … the State has even indicted First Amendment protected speech and conduct.”
Meanwhile, she argued that the state’s RICO statute, referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act law, cannot survive a constitutional test if a court “reads into it an element of criminal financial gain for the individual and enterprise, and the economic or physical threat or injury.”
Failing that, it would allow for the “punishment of speech and political conduct long and fully protected under the First Amendment,” the court papers added.
“There is NO TRUTH to those accusations. I have no idea why I am being asked to testify at the trial,” he wrote on social media. “I have had no discussions with the DA’s office since I testified before the special grand jury several months ago. Strikes me as yet another effort by the FAKE media to attack or smear me. Fake news is fake news. Always has been. Always will be. Enjoy your afternoon. God bless each of you.”
Earlier, Ms. Willis issued a filing that said Mr. Wood and several others “are witnesses for the state in the present case,” while no other details were mentioned.
While reports have said that Ms. Powell was an attorney for President Trump after the 2020 election, she wrote in a filing that she didn’t serve on the former president’s legal team at the time. There was some confusion after she appeared alongside then-Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis in a news conference about election irregularities.
Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Ellis are among the 19 defendants who were charged in Fulton County in August, alongside President Trump.
As for President Trump, he also faces state charges in New York City after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted him for allegedly falsifying business records in connection to the 2016 election. Federal prosecutors earlier this summer charged President Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left the White House and for his actions following the 2020 election.
